Businesses that have long relied on SEO to reap leads and sales are now hustling to optimize their websites for answer engines. But AEO is not radically different from SEO, says Nikhil Lai, Principal Analyst, Performance Marketing at Forrester.

“One of the most common mistakes companies make is overestimating the difference between answer engines and search engines,” he says. “There are some big differences between the two disciplines, but underlying both is the need for precise, straightforward content that bots can access the clearest possible way.”

In its report “Zero-Click Goes Shopping,” Forrester recommends how businesses should approach some of those key differences regarding bot access and content.

Think Bing

Until recently, businesses optimized their websites primarily for Googlebot, which made sense given that Google owned approximately 90% of global search market share. However, many answer engines, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, use Bing’s index and bots to at least some degree. If your site isn’t optimized for Bing, it’s appreciably less likely to show up on those answer engines.

Unlike Google’s crawlers, those of Bing and other, newer AI engines cannot render Javascript. For that reason, critical site pages should offer HTML or other easily rendered languages for crawlers. The bots of these newer engines are also still in learning mode, so they rely on websites’ structured data to provide context for the content they’re crawling.

These younger bots also benefit from having new content pushed to them rather than being left  to find it on their own. Bing’s recently introduced protocol, IndexNow, triggers its bots to visit and crawl your site, but it’s up to the websites to alert IndexNow. “Whenever you have a new piece of content that you want to be crawled, you have to let them know,” Lai says. That entails generating and hosting API keys and submitting the applicable URLs to IndexNow.

And while Google uses its E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness) framework to determine a website’s quality and worthiness of being prioritized in search rankings, Bing opts for quality and credibility (QC). This gives more weight to what others say about a business, according to Lai. To increase their share of voice, companies should distribute content throughout the internet via earned and paid media as well as on their owned channels.

Content Quantity and Quality

This need to establish a presence far and wide coincides with the need to produce more text, visual and video content. The bots of answer engines such as Anthropic’s Claude have a crawl-to-referral ratio — the number of times they crawl a website’s pages for every visitor they send to the site — of approximately 43,000 to 1, Lai says. In comparison, Google’s ratio is 5 to 1.

But the quality of the content matters as much as the quantity. “The most important thing content needs to do is directly respond to the prompt that’s being used on the engine,” Lai says. “Bots are most likely to map words used in the prompt and used in the content.” Forums such as Reddit and Quora, review sites and social listening can suggest not only what people are asking but also how they’re asking it; some companies use prompt-volume and AI-search tracking tools as well.

Also keep in mind that people ask answer engines many more follow-up questions to each prompt than they ask search engines, Lai adds: “Unless you have content that specifically responds to that intent, you’re not going to be found.”

Numerous organizations are trying to satiate the AI bots by adding to their content FAQ text that mimics common queries. Words aren’t necessarily enough, however. Infographics, photographs and other visual elements enhance what Lai calls the “semantic richness” of copy that models and answers consumer queries.

To satisfy queries such as “Is Brand X better than Brand Y?” Lai suggests creating comparison content. He acknowledges that brands typically steered clear of referencing competitors on their sites but says, “Topics that would have been taboo — ‘our credit card is better than X’ — if they don’t do that, the bot is going to have an unfavorable opinion.”

As for how to produce the ever-increasing volumes of text and imagery? “You need to use AI to create content,” Lai says, “but it shouldn’t seem like you used AI.”

A Cross-Functional Opportunity

Social media is generally considered a powerhouse for consumer discovery. Yet a 2025 Forrester survey found that answer engines are even more influential across the discovery, evaluation and commitment stages, outperforming social media by 12 percentage points.

Answer engines’ potential to improve a brand’s performance throughout the funnel means companies should prioritize AEO by making it a cross-functional responsibility. Content and IT are at the core, says Lai, but PR, brand marketing and social are among the other teams that also need to be involved. “People aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to reorganize around this now,” he adds.